A voice paging system is the most popular add-on peripheral to a telephone system and one of the easiest to sell. This offers the potential to increase the size and profitability of every telephone system sale. By including a telephone paging system in each one of your telephone system proposals, you are offering a complete value-added voice communications system. It helps you support the “one vendor” concept and enhances your image as a knowledgeable communications consultant.

Push-to-Talk (PTT) is a collaborative tool which enables you to exchange broadcasts with users subscribed to a PTT channel, much like a walkie-talkie. You can transmit pages and PTT broadcasts using your handset, headset, or speakerphone and you can reject them, place them on hold, and end them at any time. Both Group Paging and PTT are available on all phones that use Polycom UC Software. Both have potential to significantly improve the efficiency of your communications by instantly transmitting messages to any number of subscribers. For example, nurses working at a hospital can use the group paging feature to page a doctor; employees can inform co-workers of meetings or visitors. You can enable one of these features or you can operate both simultaneously. Paging and PTT each have 25 groups/channels you can subscribe to.

PTT Mode: The phone behaves like a walkie-talkie; you can broadcast audio to a PTT channel and recipients subscribed to that channel can respond to your message.

Paging Mode You can send a one-to-many announcement to a page group. Pages play only through the receiving phone’s speakerphone; pages cannot play through a headset or handset.

Important facts when speaking with customers

The Polycom Paging method is using a proprietary multicast protocol encapsulating an RTP stream

1 multicast address with 1 port. Separate paging groups/PTT channels are created using special headers within the multicast stream.

Competitive Summary

Cisco/Yealink/Snom Paging method: Raw RTP stream over Multicast

Each Group/Channel is a unique multicast IP address-Port pair.

Max # of Groups

Polycom: Max 24 Groups for paging & additional 24 channels for PTT

Yealink: Max 10 paging groups (for listen and send)

Snom: Max 10 paging groups (for listen and send)

Aastra: Max 5 groups (for listen and send)

Cisco: Max 2 listen groups, max 5 send groups

Polycom Paging Benefits and key differentiators:

Designed originally for use over Wi-Fi networks so there is a significant focus on robustness and fault tolerance in the face of connection issues, adverse or lossy networks

Advanced Paging Priorities:

Both Paging and PTT have a Priority, Emergency, as well as 22 additional page normal groups. Priority pages supersede normal pages. Emergency pages supersede all other pages and active calls

Competitor phones - list all page groups in a precedence ordering so that pages interrupt each other according to the ordering

Competitor phones – No specific emergency page group

Competitor phones – No specific priority page group

Polycom Paging instantaneous race conditions are handled based on MAC address assuming the pages both have the same priority

Competitor phones – no info on how race conditions are resolved

Pages received during active calls can be mixed into the call or indicated to the user that a page is waiting based on configuration

Competitor phones – Have similar configuration to control whether pages play out over top of a call or not (barge-in / autoanswer -> Aastra, Snom, Cisco)

Separate volume controls

Emergency pages can have an increased volume compared to other page levels.

Competitor phones – No independent control of volumes

Paging volumes can be configured independently from regular call volumes.

Competitor phones – No independent control of volumes

Finer control of page group accessibility

Paging group participation is available to the end user. Phone admins may configure which page groups are available then the end user can choose which of those groups they enable/disable via the phone UI

Separate transmit capability allowing for some phones to be used for receiving pages only but not transmitting within a group.

Codecs:

All competitors can use G711 as well as G722 (wideband) codecs as well so no difference here.

Paging group labeling

The Polycom paging solution allows for labeling of a Page Group so that this label appears on screen announcing which page is playing

Competitor phones – Typically label all incoming pages the same, such as “Incoming Page” with no differentiation of the group

When selling paging to Lync/Skype for Business users, be sure to mention that pages received by phones that have logged in users causes those users presence status to change to 'Available' even if they are actually 'Away'